If We Don’t Follow God’s Principles in Training Children, Can We Be Surprised that Many Drift Away?

You are to produce godly offspring, who will themselves produce more godly offspring, to affect the world increasingly for Jesus Christ, generation after generation.

The family is the first and most fundamental of all human institutions
which God ordained in Scripture, and it is the educational unit which God uses
to transmit His knowledge from one generation to the next. I believe that a
lack of a solidly biblical approach in this whole area of education is doing
great harm to an entire generation of Christian children.

Personally, for our children over the years, we chose a combination
of homeschooling and Christian schooling. (I do understand that for some, their
circumstances are such that this is not an option. I just want to say that all
of us should be trying to make the principles of Scripture foundational to our
thinking, as best we can.)

Surprisingly, the opposition we get to the educational choice
we have made doesn’t usually come from non-Christians (the ones in our street
are delighted with the outcome)—it comes from Christians.

Some of their main arguments are: ‘Your kids should be in the
public school to witness to the other kids’, and ‘You need to throw your kids
out there so they know how to survive’. When I hear these, I ask people to show
me from the Bible how they can justify this. I believe it’s a prime example
of how we’ve been ‘evolutionized’—by that I mean we’ve taken the world’s way
of thinking and added it to our thinking, and to the Bible.

The family in God’s Word

The family has its foundation in the book of Genesis, when God
took dust and made a man, then took his rib/side and made a woman.

One of the most important aspects of marriage is given in Malachi 2:15—to have godly offspring. You are to produce godly offspring,
who will themselves produce more godly offspring, to affect the world increasingly
for Jesus Christ, generation after generation.

Today, there are a lot of pressures on young couples not to have
children, or at least not until they have certain material goods first. Also,
there is little emphasis on ensuring the godliness of those offspring. This
is reflected in the next generation, which drifts still further from the things
of God.

Everywhere I go, in the majority of Christian homes it’s ‘Mum’
that prays most with the children, and does most of their spiritual training.
But according to the Bible it is supposed to be ‘Dad’ (except of course where
mothers are forced to raise their children without a father). One of the greatest
problems in Christian homes today is that most husbands and fathers do not carry
out their God-commanded responsibility to be the spiritual head of their family,
and to train their children.

Isaiah 38:19 (KJV) says: ‘The father to the children shall make known
thy truth.’

Ephesians 6:4 (KJV) commands fathers to ‘provoke not your children to
wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.’

Psalm 78 is a long one, but every parent should read it. Basically
it is saying, over and over—fathers, teach your children so they’ll not forget
to teach their children. So that they might not forget the works of God, but
keep His commandments.

Interestingly, in the last part of Psalm 78, you read that the
Israelites did forget the works of God. Which is why they ended up adopting
the pagan religions of the day and so on—because the fathers did not teach the
children.

‘What mean these stones?’

When Joshua crossed the Jordan River, he told the people to build
a memorial from stones, so that when their children asked them what the stones
meant, they would not forget to tell them what God had done.

However, after Joshua died, ‘… there arose another
generation after them, which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which
he had done for Israel. And the children of Israel did evil in the sight
of the Lord, and served Baalim’ (Judges 2:10–11, KJV).

They lost it—in one generation. How? The fathers didn’t
teach the children. I think the same has happened in America and other
parts of the West today. It is just assumed ‘Oh, the kids are going
to church, to Sunday school, they’ll be fine’. Parents, we
should be getting our Bible teaching from home, from studying the Word
of God as a family.

It is so vital to have a regular time when you get together and
pray and read as a family. And to worship together.1

There is a very familiar verse which says, ‘Train
up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart
from it’ (Proverbs 22:6 (KJV)). Or ‘it will not depart from him’. The word ‘train’
here is related to the word palate (the roof of your mouth). Hebrew mothers
used to get their children to eat new foods by mashing it up and putting
it into their mouths so they had no option but to swallow. That
way, when they were older, they would naturally eat and like those foods.

My wife and I have read to and prayed with our children right
from when they were born, and some people thought we were crazy. But our children
have grown up with a love for reading and an understanding of prayer that will
be with them for the rest of their lives.

Teenage rebellion

People often talk about those ‘teenage rebellious years’. I believe
that in most instances (not all), these are nothing more than a lack of teaching
to acquire a taste for the things of the Lord in the early years. Once children
become teenagers (and we all know that there are hormonal changes and certain
behaviour patterns related to puberty and adolescence), it’s very difficult
to change their behaviour.

Salt

Those trying to justify their belief that children should not
be in Christian or homeschooling often say, ‘Well, we’re supposed
to be the salt of the earth.’ Matthew 5:13 (KJV) says we are supposed to be the salt of the earth, but if it loses
its flavour, it’s contaminated salt—no longer good for anything.
Also, Mark 9:50 (KJV) says, ‘Have salt in yourselves’. You can’t
be the salt of the earth until you’ve got salt—uncontaminated
salt.

When babies are born, they don’t know about the Word of God. They
don’t know about Jesus dying on the cross. They don’t know what it means that
God created in six days, and about marriage, and any of that. It is our job
as parents (particularly the father as the spiritual head of the house) to be
pouring in the uncontaminated salt.

However, all of us are sinful by nature. That beautiful little
baby is biased against God, so it doesn’t by nature want the truth. It is as
if there are holes at the bottom of our children leaking out the salt we are
pouring in at the top. This means we’re going to have to work extra hard—they
won’t automatically end up salt-filled.

Another factor

1 Corinthians 15:33 basically means that bad company corrupts good character.
This is a scriptural principle—that the bad will influence the good more
than the good will influence the bad.

Look at Lot (Genesis 18,19). Did Sodom influence Lot, or did Lot influence Sodom? His sons-in-law
didn’t even believe him. His wife looked back, presumably with a
longing look. Who influenced whom?

Let’s be honest, in a public school situation, do our children
bring home swear words or do the others take home the Bible verses? You know
the answer.2

You see, it’s much easier for our children to be dragged
down than for them to drag the others up. Remember also that children are not
miniature adults (1 Corinthians 13:11). In a world of no absolutes, evolution, sex outside marriage,
humanism, false religions—they’ll be tossed to and fro. How do they
know which way to go? How do they know what to choose? They don’t until
they’ve been trained in truth and can recognize the difference between
good and evil.

Seeing the world through biblical glasses

Training children means much more than just having a daily
Bible reading with them—it means sharing a Christian worldview about
everything, all the time (see Deuteronomy 6:7), as naturally as breathing. In every interaction we have with
our children, we can help teach them a Christian way of thinking. That
is why the ministry of Answers in Genesis/Creation magazine
sees the real issues not as ‘the facts’ (these are the same
for everybody), but the framework through which one views the facts. And
that framework is either Christian or secular—either biased for
God or against Him.

Sadly, most children from Christian homes are being trained in
a secular worldview, to which ‘God’ is added. But one can’t
Christianize a secular philosophy, which is what even a lot of Christian
schools/texts try to do. Sadly, even those which are ‘anti-evolution’
often fall into this error. Our children end up thinking in a secular
way, with God and the Bible just ‘add-on extras’, rather than
being relevant, ultimately, to everything, and the supreme authority.

Now people say that building motor cars, for example, has nothing
to do with the Bible. But it does—if it weren’t for the Bible, people wouldn’t
have built motor cars. Modern science that put man on the moon, that built motor
cars and computers didn’t come from the Buddhist religion, it came out of Christianity.
People naturally expected to find unchanging laws that applied to the whole
universe once they believed in an unchanging, lawful God who made the whole
universe.

Sadly, sometimes someone will tell me, ‘My parents forced Christianity
on me and I rejected Christianity. I’m not going to force it on my kids.’ In
every instance where I’ve talked to people like that, Christianity was imposed
legalistically from the top down, not built from the foundation up. When you
build it from the foundation up, starting with the logical foundations of all
doctrine in Genesis, not trying to prove the Bible with science but using the
Bible to understand science, it makes a world of difference. It’s no longer
just your opinion—it is the Creator’s instructions.

Martin Luther said, ‘See to it that you cause your children to
be instructed first in spiritual things, that you point them first to God and
after that to the world.’ But in these days, this order, sad to say, is turned
back to front.

How you train your children, and how they train their children,
and so on can potentially affect millions of people. Parents, you can’t
take your TV or your car to heaven with you, but you can take your children.
What an awesome responsibility!

Footnotes

There seem to be unwritten rules that once
you become a teenager, you’re not allowed to sit with your parents in
church; you sit with all the other teenagers, throwing paper planes or writing
notes or whatever. We are losing the sense of worshipping as a family.

Though I’m very much a supporter
of Christian schools, you have to be careful here, too—in fact, we’re
even careful before our children join a church youth group. Why? Years ago,
even the non-Christian youth had a Christian morality, and the Christian youth
were much more Christian. But today this evolutionized philosophy, which says
that everyone determines truth by their own opinions, has so permeated the culture
that it has affected most Christians as well. You only have to look at the things
accepted in many church youth groups today which were wisely considered wrong
a mere generation ago.

Newsletter

Thank You!

Thank you for signing up to receive email newsletters from Answers in Genesis.

Whoops!

Your newsletter signup did not work out. Please refresh the page and try again.

Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively. We focus on providing answers to questions about the Bible—particularly the book of Genesis—regarding key issues such as creation, evolution, science, and the age of the earth.